Canonical, how does it happen?

Canonical,reason, resolve

[ballada]

I have just looked at a thread about canonical problems and how to resolve it but did not understand a word. I am afraid I am totally useless at code. It made me wonder so I checked my site and it appears that I have this problem as well. How does it happen? When I publish I always use the www form. I have never done any thing that didn't have the www. in the title so how do you get the problem? I know I am going to have to go back and look at that code to resolve this, even though I really do not understand what I am doing, but how do I stop it happening in the future?

Thanks Dominique

[longen]

To start with - check all your HTML code to see if any pages link to www.domain.com/index.html, or varients.

If they do, change those links to www.domain.com/

[Gary_Numan]

Did you build your site yourself and then upload it to the server?

If so, there is some code that you can put into a file called .htaccess that will sort all the problems out in one easy solution.

Let me know if you need any help in putting it all together, it is really quite simple when you know :)

Gary

[jtara]

How it happens is quite simple - when others link to you, they may arbitrarily leave off or add the "www". They also may arbitrarily leave off or add "index.html". You have no control over what others type-in when they manually ad links to you on their websites.

The "www" is an unfortunate artifact, and there is really no reason for it's existence today. While you are fixing your canonacal problem please follow the modern canon - drop the "www".

(Ducking...)

www, ftp, smtp, etc. identify SERVERS, not SERVICES. In most cases, small websites have them all resolve to the same address. There actually is a bit in the DNS system to identify services - but - guess what? It has almost zero support and is almost never used.

At one time, when computing power was much less, and at the time time, the Internet was much smaller, it was commonplace to run FTP on one physical server, SMTP on another, WWW on another, DNS on another, etc. At the same time, the Internet was so small, that there were very few who actually need more than ONE server to handle a particular service. In earlier days, those few who needed more had www2, www2, etc.

Now we have Google with 50,000 servers behind "www.google.com". They use every trick in the book to get you routed to the nearest, most available server.

The notion of "here is my FTP server, here is my WWW server" is now anachronistic. How about "here is my company"? You are "example.com", period. The technology is there to sort it all out.

[ballada]

Thanks for you replies everybody. That has really cleared things up. Is the fact that you can get to a site either through mysite.com or www.mysite.com a big deal with the SEs given that it seems quite common place now?

Regards

Dominique

PS If it is Gary, then I may need that help.

[longen]

You should choose one - probably the one that most webmasters have already linked to - usually www.
Then redirect non-www to www.